


Leave the door open

by Ardelier



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Post-Season/Series 03, Romangst?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-07 22:07:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20316757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ardelier/pseuds/Ardelier
Summary: He is gone and then he is back.





	Leave the door open

**Author's Note:**

> There are probably errors here but I needed to get some feelings out.

The things that wreck you are never the ones you’d expect.

She’d been sundered by losing him of course. That last moment: glassy eyed with a sad smile, the light splintering around him before everything went dark. And then he was gone. She’d checked, half-hysterical, looking first for him and then for some scrap of him, unsure if that would be a relief or another wrench in her chest. Nothing. _Nothing_. He’d been vaporized. _Instantaneous_, Owens had said kindly, as though the speed of his death was something she had wanted to entertain. But that was the beat: he was gone. Gone. Gone.

Taking care of the kids had pulled her out of bed every morning for that month, and El’s questions kept her up at night. The girl’s grief was like an animal caught in a cage too small: frantic and unforgiving, coiling into silence but never shutting its eyes. She’d demanded Joyce narrate his last moments in detail, again and again, and then the speculations started: what if, what if, _what if_. Every day that month, Joyce felt like she’d smoked a carton of cigarettes, her throat raw and aching, chest tight. The Wheelers and Sinclairs existed on the periphery, quietly ushering Will and El between houses for extended sleepovers while Joyce went up to his cabin with Gary. The first time, the realtor had politely averted his eyes and commented on the view while she doubled over and cried so hard that the only thing for it was heaving in the bushes near where Hop used to park.

And then in the next month it got a little easier. She’d dealt with grief before, with loss, and knew well enough that you made a space for that hurt inside and found a way to keep on going. The pain didn’t abate much, she just lived with it like a toothache, sometimes encouraging the sharp, jarring pain by thinking at night how he’d tripped over his words asking about their date. Enzo’s. Friday. 7. Her turn to put the pedal down on whatever future they were driving towards. Hop wasn’t subtle—how could a man that size ever master the art of subtlety? But Joyce admitted that she hadn’t been paying attention, at least not at first, to his heavy looks and the way that he’d orbit closer to her while he paced at the store, each time a fraction of an inch disappearing between them. Leave it to the conspiracy theorist to be the most perceptive person in the room: Murray had clocked on to whatever Hop and Joyce were playing at almost immediately. Apparently neither of them were that subtle.

It’s not the Friday that would have been their date that leaves her feeling like she can’t breathe. It’s almost two months later, when the house sells and there are boxes everywhere, when she’s in the kitchen while the kids are helping pack (aimlessly throwing items into unmarked boxes) and Mike is retelling the lighter part of that adventure: trying to find a gift for El so she’d forgive him for lying.

“So we find a bear, and it’s looking good, and then the guy tells me it’s like three hundred dollars!?” Mike’s voice is tinged with indignation.

“And you only had three fifty,” Lucas cuts in, a detail that sends the rest into laughter.

“Yeah, I only _had_ three fifty, and why does a bear cost so much anyway?”

“Just wait til you gotta pull out all the stops,” Dustin says, somehow sounding like he’s been married thirty years. “Gifts, flowers, even dinner at Enzo’s.”

“_Enzo’s_!” Lucas and Mike yell, and El sneaks in a “What is Enzo?” but Joyce doesn’t hear the rest of it because she has to bolt outside for some air or her chest is going to explode.

A month later and she and the boys and El are on the road, travelling to a slightly bigger house in a slightly bigger town, somewhere well away from Hawkins. Getting everyone settled and the house in order provides a welcome distraction, and then the kids are back in school and she’s working days at the local grocer’s. It’s the same but slightly better and slightly worse. Sometimes when the kids are asleep and she’s had too much wine, Joyce digs out one of Hop’s shirts from a box in her closet and cries into it for a long time. The fabric still smells like him, a combination of sweat and smoke and earthiness that’s heady when she inhales it. She rounds the bases of grief and lands on being angry at how unfair it is. Losing Bob had been hard, a sweet man like that, easy to get along with, someone uncomplicated for her too complicated life (the kind of man who didn’t remind her of a bad relationship). It had felt unfair too, but mostly to him. This time Joyce felt like _she_ was the one getting ripped off, that she and Hop had been on the edge of something she’d peeked at now and again but hadn’t been ready to consider wholly, and then he was gone. And when she thought about his sad eyes and smile in that last moment, she was sure he’d been grieving what wasn’t to come, too.

One day Murray calls and after saying Hop’s name, Joyce feels like she’s hearing static instead of his voice. “I can’t. I _can’t_,” she tells him and lets the phone drop while his voice bleats her name over and over until he gives up and leaves her alone.

The next week, it’s Owens calling. The words fill her head without any kind of order: American. Prisoner. Russia. Demogorgon. It makes less sense to her that that dissertation on magnetic fields she’d checked out from the Hawkins library. Then Owens says something that hits her clear and sharp like a piece of glass:

“He’s alive, Joyce. _He’s alive_. He’s coming home.”

She manages to scratch out a few details on the back of a pizza menu, hands shaking so hard that later Jonathan will gently tease her about there being an earthquake in the house. This is after she tells the kids, and their crying and questioning and celebrating finally gives way to a tranquil stupor, El and Will on the couch, red-eyed, watching a _Magnum PI_ rerun without really watching it, and Jonathan sitting beside her in the kitchen, his hand over hers. No one wants to sleep. Owens confirms that Hop will be there at the end of the week, that he insisted on going wherever El had gone.

Joyce insists that the kids go to school, at least until Friday, and then spends her days frittering the hours away at work before coming home and cleaning mindlessly. There’s a dull ache in her back from scrubbing baseboards when she sees his box in her closet and realizes that there’s nothing here for him except some old shirts and his uniform. She goes to K-Mart and stands for a long time surrounded by men’s underwear, the grief back in her throat. This is so mundane, so _normal_, shopping for new clothes. She recalls Owens telling her Hop’s condition: thin, malnourished, roughed up. Scruffier than usual. Nothing fatal, nothing disfiguring. They’d needed him functional, so it was drugs and sleep deprivation and bad food making up most of his time there. She selects some shirts and boxers and sweats in a range of sizes, and then lingers in front of a rack of colourful button up shirts, none of them quite like the one he was wearing on that last night but close enough so that she eventually decides to get one, tucking it at the bottom of her basket.

On Friday everyone is up at 7, and Joyce thinks they have a long day of waiting ahead of them when tires crunch up her gravel driveway at 8:30, just as she is washing up the breakfast dishes. The unremarkable looking sedan has at least four people in it, Joyce can see from her living room window, and she’s caught up in trying to see behind the front passenger’s head when El and Will rush the front door and tear it open, stumble down the steps to the car. Jonathan comes to get her and leads her out, and she has to clutch the rails leading down from the porch as Hopper shoves the car door open and pulls himself out, catching El as she leaps at his neck and using his free arm to gather Will to his chest. All three of them are talking and crying as Owens materializes beside Joyce, summarizing the trip and what he’s doing to bring Hopper back to life (the formal kind, with paperwork). She’s nodding but her eyes are locked on Hopper, taking in the added grey in his hair and beard (trimmed before he arrived, she guessed), the missing bulk in his frame. Then the kids are dragging him forward towards the house, and Owens is retreating to the car. Joyce doesn’t move from the second step, her legs don’t seem to want to do anything. She watches Jonathan give Hopper a side hug, and then take the kids inside—“To give them a second,” he says and shakes his head when El’s face suggests she’s going to ask about it. Then it’s just the two of them outside in the cool morning air. They both watch Owens and his men retreat in that bland sedan, disappearing from view around the corner. And then Joyce looks at Hop.

His jaw is moving, she can see his beard shift, but his mouth is pressed into a line. From her spot she’s almost the same height he is, and she uses the vantage to take him in, hands jammed under her arms. His face has a few more lines, and there’s a scar on his forehead, up near the hairline. Tears begin to crowd in her eyes and Joyce takes a shaky breath.

“Hop, I,” she starts and he’s already shaking his head, already shifting so that the space between them narrows.

“Don’t. Don’t say sorry.” His voice is deep and rough and somehow still gentle. Hearing him again snaps a thread inside of her and Joyce feels dizzy, nearly pitches off her step. Hop’s hands catch her arms first and then he ushers her against his chest, propping her up. Her face is against his collarbone and his is against the top of her head. He’s holding her so tight that Joyce can’t move her arms. His chest heaves so hard that her upper body moves with it, and for a moment she absorbs the _realness_ of him holding her on the front steps of her new house. This would rattle her more but after all the monsters and portals and the Upside Down, a man newly back from the dead on her porch is actually a little closer to normal than not.

“Hop, _Hop_,” she says, startling him enough so that he loosens his grip and she can finally touch his face with one hand. He leans into the weight of her palm and closes his eyes. When he opens them they gleam with tears, his brows and jaw back to clenching and unclenching. His hands fall to her hips. They stand there like that, looking at each other, two people weighed down but what they have done together and what has been done to them. Joyce doesn’t have the words: all the dreaming she’s done about this moment, the rehearsals she’s directed at 3am when sleep evades her, all of it jams up in her chest because he’s _here_. He’s here and he’s mostly whole and he’s looking at her with that same intense, narrow gaze like he did down in the bunker and this time instead of a joke she folds her arms around his neck and cries against his shoulder. His body shudders against hers and she can feel two massive, shaking sobs leave his chest, his huffing breath muffled by her hair. They stand like that, holding each other and shaking, until El quietly cracks the front door and says she and Will made more coffee, can everyone come in now?

He provides everyone with a curated version of his time in Russia, and Joyce wonders how much he will hold back from her. He’s cautious with revealing what hurts, and this is a big hurt—when El knocks a spoon off the table in the midst of excited storytelling, Hop flinches so hard that Joyce thinks the girl might have recovered her powers. But it’s just the spoon and months of raw, tattered nerves, no telekinesis necessary. She puts a hand on his forearm and Hop covers her hand with his, then slips his hand around so their palms are together. Joyce squeezes her hand slightly and his thumb runs across her knuckles. A small thing, but the last time she’d rested her hand on his Hop had asked about dinner and then Joyce had retreated, not ready to look over that ledge just yet.

After lunch he’s exhausted, so Joyce ushers him to bed, pointing at the bag from K-Mart with his new clothes. He plucks the flashy button up from the bottom and looks at her, eyebrows raised so high they almost merge with his hairline.

“I couldn’t resist, okay?” Joyce says, breaking into laughter as he parrots “_Resist?” _back at her with a grin. “It was a dynamic look, sue me.”

Hop looks so flattered by this, just beyond pleased with her admission, that Joyce pretends to grab for the shirt. He keeps it just out of reach with ease, laughing too, and then tosses the shirt on the bed and catches her outstretched hand, pulling Joyce forward. He’s holding first one hand and then the other, and Joyce follows his movement as Hop sits on the edge of the bed. His hands are rough and heavy and without thinking, Joyce laces her fingers through his. The sudden movement of his jaw acknowledges this.

“I missed you so much,” he says, voice hoarse. She watches him take a huge gulping breath. His eyes move to hers and then slightly over her shoulder, then to the floor. When he looks back up at her he says, “I thought of you and the kids every day. Every _hour_. Every memory I had. It was like reruns.” He speaks in a pained rush. “And I thought about, remember when I said talking doesn’t solve anything, doesn’t work?”

He’s looking at her like this is the most important thing she’ll ever say, and Joyce panics for a moment when the memory doesn’t come (and in fairness, Hop says a lot of things don’t solve anything or work). And then she remembers tagging prices and listening to Hop fume about El and Mike. Then writing that speech together for him to practice. And later, finding that speech and giving it to El.

“Yeah,” she says, letting a beat hang before the side of her mouth flashes in a smile. “Before the heart to heart you didn’t give El?”

He treats her to a look of such affectionate annoyance that for a moment they _are_ back in the store, him seething about his daughter’s dating life, and her dispensing wisdom about feelings.

Then Hop growls and the playfulness almost breaks her heart.

“Not talking isn’t…better,” Hop says slowly. He lets her hands go and it’s only natural that they should find their way to cradling his head, fingers weaving into his hair. Hop’s eyes flutter shut for a second at this, throat bobbing. He looks up at her. “It was stupid not to talk to El. I didn’t want to, I hate feeling laid out like that. And with you I didn’t know how to say, I didn’t know if you were _ready_, or interested…”

“The not date?” she asks. She doesn’t want to stop touching him and their knees bump as he leans back and looks up at her fully.

“Hmm,” he nods, and there’s a touch of pout to his mouth that makes Joyce realize that after all of _this_, all the time, he’s still a little peeved she stood him up to see Scott about some magnets.

“I was testing the waters,” Hop says. “Or I would have, if you had actually showed up.”

Joyce is about to argue back, remind him of the fact that she had actually been _right_, when Hop gives her such a rakish grin, one eyebrow quirking up in that ladykiller way of his that she feels weak in the knees.

He’s enjoying her momentary short circuiting. “So you can imagine I was pretty excited when you asked me out on a date-date.” His voice softens, losing its mirth. “We’d get to Enzo’s on Friday and after a bottle of wine I’d tell you that I’d been thinking about us, our…our family, and that we _do_ make a good team, not just, you know, when it comes to Russians and magnets and shit, and that uh it might be worth seeing if we were, or we could…”

“Go steady?” Joyce offers, and the look he gives her is so rich with desire that her heart picks up a bit.

“Be together,” Hop agrees, nodding. His arms circle her slowly, pulling her in between his knees. He’s looking up at her. The next move is hers to make, the last bit of space hers to close.

Joyce looks at him, taking in the face of a man she thought she’d never see again. He is scruffy and sharp and _loud_, and he is hers. They have both been wrecked by big things and by little things, and Joyce feels like they’ve earned this, him in her house and sleeping in her bed.

“I need you here,” she says, and kisses him. The first kiss is tentative, a chaste smack of the lips like old friends give, and then he’s pulling her onto his lap and one of his hands is in her hair and both of her hands are in his and they are pressing scorching, greedy kisses against one another’s mouths, Hop groaning softly, until their air runs out and they have to separate. She pants, dazed, and he kisses her jaw and then her neck. Both of them are suddenly grinning, wild and drunk on this second chance. She breathes his air and thumbs his cheekbones, tracing the edge of each circle beneath his eyes.

“Take a nap,” Joyce says. Hop’s eyes are foggy with lust and exhaustion. She kisses him when he starts to protest. “We have time now.” And they actually really _do_ have time now. “Rest. Get better. Everyone will be here when you wake up.”

They disentangle and he flops back, already half asleep. Hop catches her hand as Joyce pushes off the bed.

“Leave the door open,” he says. Joyce nods.

“At least three inches,” she says, and Hop looks at her from the pillow, eyes shiny despite his weariness, squeezing her fingers in his. He is in love with her and she is in love with him, and before too long they will admit to that, and do more talking, and piece back together the family they had created back in Hawkins.

But now she lets him rest, back where he belongs.


End file.
